56 ( / / ':- Ol >l ð " f:J. , \ _ .- / \... · .! , í die',>' ?? ./ ..... ., ' j ";" ';, 1 _ \ ( l " / ø J r- I I ...", - / ..-.;;:. (' ,' 1 I. / . ,::>- :....... J I' Â; . I ''!..: A '1 \, -;t0"f ..ø:ÌJJ :=' "} '\' \\ ..I., \ . ' , ,I' - / 4' .,r ., I \. .. I i f( :'. · /' "/! \\ · /' I - tIJ //1 ;. I / it) , r .. .: ./ .....:'" \ :/ \ . tl \ " '- .. I:, ..... . þ ... 'V .\ '\ 1 _ .. .......... - .. I I j- , A ,t- I " " -- /1 ..:\.. , . 1 1 I "It's such fun to hear stock tips again." . long hours in two cItIes. In 1930, Wagner's law practice became a part- nership- Wagner, Quillinan & Rif- kind, Francis J. Quillinan being the son-in-law of Alfred E. Smith, the former governor of New York who had been defeated as the Democratic candidate for President in 1928-and Rifkind hired Edythe Griffinger, a young woman from Newark, to be his secretary both in Wagner's Senate of- fice and in the law firm in New York. In 1983, Miss Griffinger-now a crisp, handsome, gray-haired lady-is still his secretary. She calls him "Judge" and he calls her "Griff." They have long since learned to communicate in a kind of oral short- hand, and relations between them are marked by terse exchanges, with no particular deference either way. "When I was first hired, I was on probation for three months," Miss Griffinger says. "Well, you know, I'm still on proba- tion." I N the same year, 1930, there began a strange episode in Rifkind's ca- reer-a sort of irrelevant yet somehow characteristic footnote. About the time Rifkind had joined Wagner's law firm, it had acquired another lawyer as an office tenant, Joseph Force Crater Crater-like Wagner himself a proud . product of the Tammany political ma- chine-was a tall, long-necked man with a preference for conspicuously elegant dress. According to Rifkind, Crater was a brilliant lawyer, who taught him a lot about brief-writing. In April of 1930, he became a Justice of the N ew York State Supreme Court. On the following August 6th- after being seen having dinner in a restaurant in the theatre district and subsequently getting into a taxi alone -he disappeared. There was consid- erable delay in reporting Crater's dis- appearance to the police. Rifkind learned that Crater's law clerk had not reported it because, the clerk ex- plained, he suspected Crater, a married man, of being "on a date" and wanted to protect him from adverse publicity. Rifkind finally went to the police him- self and reported the Judge as a miss- ing person. A reward was offered for information, and a grand-jury investi- gation was held (Rifkind was among those who testified), but Crater was never found. Rifkind's subsequent occasions to recall the case have been laced with a kind of comedy-discordantly, in view of his respect and affection for Cra- ter. In August, 1937, he and his wife were vacationing in Maine and de- cided to visit Mrs. Crater at her sum- mer home in Belgrade Lakes. It was the seventh anniversary of Crater's disappearance, and several members of the press were also at Belgrade Lakes and were staying at the same hotel as the Rifkinds. By coincidence, the chief of the New York City Police Depart- ment's Homicide Squad was there as well. The press decided something was up, and when the Rifkinds left the hotel to drive to Mrs. Crater's house they found themselves at the head of a procession of cars occupied by a covey of reporters, including the Hearst col- umnist Dorothy Kilgallen. Rifkind threw the followers off the scent by turning in at the driveway of a man he happened to know. And in 1971 the New York City Bar Association re- ceived a letter from a conscientious but ill-informed New York City police in- spector in the Missing Persons Squad, who wrote requesting any information the Association might have as to Judge Crater's whereabouts, adding that another person being sought was "Simon Rifkin [sic], Attorney, for- merly of 120 Broadway, New York City, complainant who filed the Miss- ing Persons report." Rifkind remarked to a Times reporter, "If they can't find me, how could they ever find Crater?" Rifkind himself has given up hope that Crater will be found or his fate known, but he still insists that specula- tion about improper conduct on Cra- ter's part is gratuitous and inappropri- ate. The Judge, he says, was "a man of impeccable manners and propriety," and he adds, "If you live as closely with a man as I did with Crater and he has unsavory innards, you discover it. " D URING the Administrations of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, Senator Wagner concentrated on economic legislation-especially on measures with the then avant-garde purposes of encouraging the organized- labor movement and counteracting the business cycle-and gradually he be- came the prototype of the Northern urban liberal. Under his direction, Rifkind worked on these bills, which were defeated with monotonous regu- larity by the Republican-controlled Congress. Finding himself in a field in which he had no training or experi- ence-his education had been in phi- losophy and law, not in the social sciences-Rifkind set about establish- ing a nationwide network of profes- sional and academic social scientists to provide him with ideas and informa- tion; among them was Paul H. Doug-